William H. Galperin

On his book The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday

Cover Interview of June 27, 2017

In a nutshell

The History of Missed Opportunities explores an
unrecognized, certainly an unappreciated, development in Romantic-era Britain: the
discovery of everyday life as a world that had been overlooked or, as Maurice
Blanchot later describes it, “what we never see a first time, but only see
again.” Emergence, first theorized somewhat later in the nineteenth century,
focusedâ€“â€“to no real surpriseâ€“â€“on the rise and synthesis of complex entities from
components that were less complicated. But in a reversal of this dynamic that
might be deemed pre-Darwinian, the impetus behind the everyday’s emergence as a
separate stratum of experience involved two things: the emancipation of the
world from subjective or phenomenological misprision in allowing a symbol
derived from nature (in, say, a Wordsworth poem) to revert back to a more basic
materiality or thingness; and second, and related, the recognition that the lives
and experiences of individuals (but also of nations and societies) were
myopically bound to futurityâ€“â€“to horizons of progress or developmentâ€“â€“that took
little stock of the present, which was increasingly “missable” (as Stanley
Cavell has termed it) but as a prelude now to being (re)discovered.

The everyday’s emergence is in the most basic sense, then,
an act of recovery that Romantic-period literature restages, transforming “history”
into a placeholder for possibilities that had been ignored in deference to the “open
futures” toward which seemingly everything, from science to social progress, to
bildung on a personal scale, was hurtling in “the age of revolution.”

And what of history at this moment? Well, in addition to
being made daily (or so it seemed), history was being mobilizedâ€“â€“notably by
empirical philosophyâ€“â€“to establish generalities and probabilities so that “what
we have found to be most usual,” as David Hume put it, “is always most
probable.” For a skeptic like Hume, for whom nothing was knowable beyond a mere
impression, historyâ€“â€“experience in aggregateâ€“â€“was more than just a guide to understanding
what was out there; it was just as importantly a conservative wish that our tomorrows
would resemble yesterday.

For the Romantics, however, who were progressively invested
in tomorrows that were different and transformativeâ€“â€“and less concerned, for
their parts, with the limits posed by subjectivityâ€“â€“history was put to
different uses. The most common were histories that are broadly linearâ€“â€“so-called
Whig historiesâ€“â€“where the past and the future were coextensive in the assumption
that each moment in time was a step toward absolute modernity and, eventually, the
end of history. But there was another use and, as my book shows, it involved
something very different: a reckoning where possibility abides in reminders and
remaindersâ€“â€“opportunities I call themâ€“â€“that are accessible in the wake of being
missed after which they are recognized, again and for the first time.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011